Sunday, March 23, 2014

Wrong kind of trash

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2007)

So does this sound like a comedy or a
tragedy? Rae, a hopeless young white nymphomaniac in a lousy Southern town,
flips out when her boyfriend ships off to Iraq and starts putting it about even
more than usual. At the end of a wild night she’s thrown out of a truck into
the road, where she lies until dawn in a bloodied stupor. Then an aging black
guy called Lazarus (a farmer and local blues singer) finds her and takes her
into his shack. At first he’s just being a good guy, but he has problems of his
own – his wife took off with a close friend, and he needs something to get
himself back on track. Figuring in some way that her redemption might be his
own, he resolves to clean her up, but she keeps wandering off, so he does,
well, the only thing he can do. He secures her in his living room with a chain
around her waist, oh and this is still wearing the dirty micro-top and panties
she turned up in. She screams and yells, but he holds firm. And that’s the set
up.

Black Snake Moan

It sounds like a comedy to me, or at least
a Russ Meyer kind of concoction where you can’t tell the difference. I didn’t
throw that out randomly – Meyer actually made a film called Black Snake, which came with the tagline
“No man escaped her island – or her whip!” I don’t remember a thing about it
now, but I’m pretty sure it was a hoot. Black
Snake Moan though is by writer-director Craig Brewer, whose underlying
premise in Hustle and Flow was that
it really is hard for a pimp. How
much worse then, for a mere nympho. And so the weirdest and worst thing about Blake Snake Moan, despite its
attractively lurid title and poster and trailer, is its general ponderous
sensitivity. Sure, the movie has its schlocky aspects; it eats up Ricci’s body,
and punctuates the action with eye-popping memory montages that illustrate
Rae’s almost constantly verge-of-orgasm mental state. But it’s also full of
boring secondary characters, dawdling self-discovery dialogue, and a lot of
scenes that barely seem to matter one way or another.

Isn’t something missing with that? Dana
Stevens in Slate came at it as
follows: “I’m sorry, but in the age of Abu Ghraib and Alberto Gonzales torture
memos, it seems important to say…Chaining people and holding them against their
will is not the right thing to do. By that I don’t mean, simplistically, that
Jackson’s character is ‘bad’ and should be punished at the end of the film. I
mean that the questions – ethical, sexual, racial, whatever – that are raised
by this initial act of violence are never addressed.” Stevens’ broad point, to
be trite about it, is that the film should be better. But I think maybe it’s
the opposite, that it should have been worse.

Apologetically Trashy?

A movie called Black Snake Moan surely has no business directly addressing ethical,
sexual or racial issues. Its better role in life is to be unapologetically
trashy. But trashy – and this is the key point – in the way that the best pulp
genre movies used to serve effortlessly as outlets for the submerged
ideological detritus of the age. Like a zombie movie that acts as a metaphor
for the sublimation of individuality in a capitalist society. Or a film noir
that blows the door open on Cold War paranoia and the oppression within the
bourgeois family.

You don’t get too many movies like that any
more, probably because that kind of subversion needs either an industry –
structure and contracts and a measure of predictability, creating crannies and
shadows where subversion can percolate and occasionally spurt to the surface –
or else a devil may care attitude (but that seems out of tune with current
moviemaking). Eli Roth’s Hostile
might have been the closest recent example of what I’m talking about – a
rampantly sleazy concoction that seemed at least semi-meaningful about
America’s current place in the world. A few episodes of the TV anthology Masters of Horror have come close too,
perhaps because the lower budget and the relatively lower visibility loosen the
constraints a bit. But really, what is Black
Snake Moan up to? The image of a white woman chained by a black man still
carries a greater charge than most other racial and gender permutations one
could think of, but there’s never any real doubt here about the basic purity of
Jackson’s motives, never any hint that the two might cross the line into some
sick master-slave thing.

The film might have been concocted solely
to show that it’s possible to take that premise and make a toothless movie out
of it. Lazarus’s heart seems to lie not with Rae but, for God’s sake, with a
kindly pharmacist played by Law and
Order’s S. Epatha Merkerson. And in the end the film is explicit that his
shock therapy has given Rae the mental structure she needs to do better from
then on. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but if you’re going to play around
with nympho psychology, why not steer toward something more diverting? Ricci is
pointlessly committed to her silly role, Jackson does his usual thing except
with a worse haircut, and Justin Timberlake is very good as the boyfriend.
Timberlake just gets better and more credible all the time. I even liked his
album. In this movie though Jackson and Ricci do all the singing.

The Number 23

Joel Schumacher has intermittently tried to
occupy more respectable territory (Tigerland,
Veronica Guerin), but with The Number
23 he reverts to his customary territory as one of the worst and most
annoying directors imaginable. His star Jim Carrey, as everyone knows, is even
more preoccupied with artistic validation than Schumacher is, and he gamely
leaps here, with misapplied earnestness, into darker waters than he’s ever
previously occupied. The star and director affect a messy collision, resulting
in a conventionally overdone, contrived film that nevertheless has glimmers of
something more affecting.

Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, an animal
control officer, fundamentally dissatisfied and drifting despite being a caring
husband and father, who comes across a book – “The Number 23” – that tells a
story of numerology-driven mayhem, and that seems to him strangely relevant to
his own life. Off the rails he goes, and the plot quickly follows – it rapidly
becomes impossible to chart how one thing leads to the next, a confusion
annoyingly accentuated by Schumacher’s technique, which is like listening to a
garbage can lid being smashed against a wall for an hour and a half. I think
this week we should have engineered a swap. Craig Brewer probably would have
made something more sensitive out of The
Number 23, whereas Black Snake Moan
would surely have been much more acceptably campy and dumb in Schumacher’s
hands. I bet he would even have got Timberlake to sing.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).